Wear + Here

“Ziggurat, East” by Scott Hocking (Summer 2008) paired with Hervé Léger’s Nichola cropped jacket.

Abandoned sites are canvases for Detroit-based Scott Hocking. Vacant for 20 years, Fisher Body Plant 21 felt more like a cave than a former car factory with stalactites falling from the ceiling from years of leaks and neglect. Stripped clean by scrappers, the factory offered Hocking only one sculptural medium (beyond space): Millions of wooden floor blocks, rebuilt as a monument to buckled ambition.

“In Detroit, going into an abandoned auto factory is my walk in the woods,” Hocking has said. “It’s the closest I can get to the top of a mountain peak—the top of a building. This is where I get my sense of wildness—my satisfaction in nature.” Roads diverged.

“Experiment in F #minor” by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller at SITE Sante Fe paired with Rosantica’s
chunky chain necklace.

Another snapshot from SITE, from 2015: Sound cued by shadows, hands passing over a table strewn with speakers. A cacophonous communion.

“Memorial” by Ellsworth Kelly at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC (Photo: Edward Owen) paired with a vintage Celine angular cuff.

Ellsworth Kelly, a solitary visionary of 20^th century abstract art, died on Sunday at the age of 92. Here, his installation for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which NY Times art critic Holland Cotter described as “one of his most moving installations, though,..one of his quietest.” All white, “Memorial” centers on a fan-shaped form facing a triptych of rectangular panels – a dynamic suggesting a dove rising above closed windows. A perfectly concise visual memorial to so many lives lost – and now his.

We are left with his wonders – including the yet-to-be-built Austin structure – and his words. “I think what we all want from art is a sense of fixity, a sense of opposing the chaos of daily living,” he told The Times in 1996. “This is an illusion, of course. What I’ve tried to capture is the reality of flux, to keep art an open, incomplete situation, to get at the rapture of seeing.” The rapture of seeing through his eyes will live on in his art.

Sydney Opera House aglow in the colors of the French flag on Saturday night paired with Maje’s Riri dress.

A world in mourning, in Parisian style.

The Wigwam Village Motel #6 in Holbrook, AZ paired with Maje’s Jacky jacquard mini skirt.

A relic of autocamping – replete with vintage cars rusting in the parking lot – that we found in Holbrook, AZ (gateway to Petrified Forest National Park). This Wigwam Village Motel was the sixth of seven such bizarro encampments along Route 66 and 31, built by Chester E. Lewis (replicating the Cave City, KY design of architect Frank Redford). Lewis purchased the plans for the misnomer motel alongside a royalty agreement that required coin-operated radios in every room with Redford reaping the revenue (in dimes; ten cents for 30 minutes of music).

These days, the teepees feel like a time warp, eerie in their nostalgia. We peaked inside a room, at the original hickory furniture and southwestern throws. And inside the antique automobiles with their tattered upholstery and unwieldy steering wheels. The motel partially closed in the late 1970s, in the wake of Interstate 40 bypassing downtown Holbrook and Lewis selling the business. Two years after Lewis’ death, his widow and children bought back the property and reopened. In 2002, the motel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Lewis’ Studebaker is still parked out front, ogling the open road.

The Grand Canyon Lodge at the North Rim paired with Veronica Beard’s Intermix-exclusive denim dickey blazer.

Not a soul in sight as we stood on the porch of the shuttered-for-the-season Grand Canyon Lodge, a throwback structure (twice) built of stone and timber, precariously perched on the coniferous North Rim. New sunset memories mingled with imagined: of guides greeting tours with songs and guests donning dinner jackets. A landmark all to ourselves, no people to scale the vastness, only devilish squirrels and craggy civility.

Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in  southern Colorado paired with a Victoria Beckham cape.

From a distance, the Great Sand Dunes seem dwarfed by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, at whose foothills they drape. But as we drove closer, their vastness walloped us with wonder. Expecting a quick jaunt in the sand, we found ourselves following others, ant trails traipsing up the camelious mounds. Wending our way up the windy spines, we felt blissfully overwhelmed by the otherworldliness of it all. In the sienna rays of sunset, we glissaded back down.

Nineteenth century explorer Zebulon Pike got it right when he wrote: “Their appearance was exactly that of a sea in a storm (except as to color).” Winds topping 40 miles an hour continually sculpt the crests, making some dunes migrate, but opposing winds keep the core in place. America the beautiful counterbalance.